How do we counter political demoralization among those who had such high hopes for the American political process just over a year ago? It helped to finally pass the health care reform bill--Democratic Party donations have surged since the vote. But we're still facing dashed hopes (including those due to the bill's more mixed aspects); exhaustion from eight years of Bush; the dispiriting legacy of the Massachusetts, New Jersey and Virginia elections; and the disastrous Supreme Court campaign finance decision. Even before all these last, too many long-time activists spent much of the past year withdrawing from the fray. Too many newer ones quit before they barely began. We need to reverse this process of withdrawal.
The 1994 midterm elections offer a cautionary tale. Long-time activist friends seemed strangely detached, so disgusted with the Party-driven political sphere--particularly after the passage of NAFTA--that they wanted nothing to do with it. Other labor, environmental, and social justice activists responded similarly. Instead of volunteering, as they'd done to elect Bill Clinton, they watched as disgruntled spectators while the Gingrich Republicans prevailed. According to national surveys, the 45 percent of registered voters who stayed home would have reversed the electoral outcome had they only gone to the polls. But no one reached out to them directly, just as far too few approached their counterparts after recent Democratic defeats.
If we want to prevent a similar dynamic from happening this fall, we might remember how demoralization and withdrawal create self-reinforcing cycles. We decide that little we do will matter, so withdraw our energy, time and money. Though we may still sign the occasional online petition, we stop reaching out to the unconverted, stop rallying publicly to voice our stands, detach ourselves from situations in which we actually engage our fellow citizens. No wonder we then feel helpless.
Face-to-face community can be an antidote. If we just hunker down behind our computers, reading the daily bad news, it's easy to feel isolated. When we work directly with others, even if the challenges are great, we're supported by their imagination and energy, their living, breathing presence, the possibilities of common action. We can start to create this sense of a community in pursuit of a common goal online, but once we meet offline, our connections become far stronger. Even successful virtual activism often builds on more personal connections. In 2006, 100,000 MoveOn volunteers called voters in key swing states. Follow-ups suggested these efforts made a significant difference, but only three percent of the organization's three million members participated. Two years later, MoveOn got a fifth of its list involved through a massive phone bank where members invited other members to participate.
It also helps to find concrete tasks. People feel bleakest when they feel there's nothing they can do, but that's never actually the case. Even in when imprisoned in Robben Island, Nelson Mandela and his compatriots retrieved forbidden letters and notes wrapped in plastic at the bottom of their food drums. They then copied the inspiring stories on scraps of toilet paper and taped them inside the rim of their toilet bowls. Republican obstructionism and Democratic compromises may be infuriating, but they hardly equal living under a dictatorship. If we can reach out to the now more dispirited legions who carried Obama to victory and give them ways to act between now and November, we have a chance to shift America's political dynamics, and build on the victories we've begin to win: covering 30 million people with health care, making college far more affordable, a recent EPA ruling that may well put an end to the coal companies' hideously destructive mountain top removal. But further progress won't happen by simply lamenting the bad news, wishing Congress had passed something better, or being satisfied with what we've gained so far.
The more we can cross expected political boundaries, the stronger the impact of our actions. In the spring of 2006, net neutrality--the principle that all Internet traffic should be treated equally--seemed doomed. The House passed a bill that would have effectively ended it. The Senate was expected to follow suit. Then the cofounder of MoveOn met the Christian Coalition's communications director at a retreat aimed at bridging political lines. They became friends, then joined to help save net neutrality with a joint New York Times ad and joint press conference at which they presented over a million signatures in support of net neutrality. They played a critical role in keeping the Internet as a commons open to all. We might build similarly unexpected coalitions with some of the more populist elements of the Tea Party movement, particularly around curtailing Wall Street.
We can take heart from remembering that when we do get people involved, or keep them involved, we never know where they'll end up. Nobel Peace prize winner Wangari Maathai recalled the pivotal role of social justice conversations at the small Catholic college she attended in Kansas, and how they helped set her on her path. Similarly, while canvassing a white working class Chicago neighborhood, a friend of mine once knocked on the door of a local woman who complained how a nearby body shop was always blocking the alley with junked-up cars. He helped get her to take her first stand, and she went on to become one of the city's most influential neighborhood voices. Who knows what the young (and not so young) Obama activists might go on to accomplish, if we just can get them reengaged.
We need to avoid the trap of purism. It may leave us feeling righteous, but it ducks the key question: how to create change within our actual historical context while working to shift the horizon of what's deemed politically possible. Think of how Kennedy and Johnson worked to put brakes on the civil rights movement for fear of shattering the Democratic coalition, with LBJ twisting the arms of Martin Luther King and Walter Reuther to oppose seating the integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation at the 1964 Atlantic City Convention. Only after the movement continued to push did Johnson muster all his political capital and skill to help to pass the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts--a model on how we might continue to push to build on the partial changes we've won. The activists who created this shift didn't demonize Johnson. They just continued to speak out for their most compelling vision of justice, until America's political culture shifted and Johnson took the risk of embracing their cause. We need to create equivalent public pressure in our time, and dismissing Obama as The Great Betrayer doesn't help.
Finally, it helps to recognize the unpredictability of our common future. There's no inevitable historical pendulum, but when people take the risks needed to create what Mandela has called "the multiplication of courage," we never know what new possibilities will open up. Not all moments of promise are realized, but we'd do well to view the future as at least partly contingent on our actions, as it has been so often in the past.
It's been a frustrating time since November 2008, but our challenge is to spend less time bemoaning our disappointments and more energy engaging with ordinary citizens the way so many of us did a year and a half ago. If we give people enough ways to act on our present crises, we never know how history might turn.
This was originally posted on TheNation.com
Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times, whose wholly updated new edition will be released March 30, of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association, and of Generation at the Crossroads: Apathy and Action on the American Campus. See www.paulloeb.org To receive his articles directly email sympa@lists.groundwire.org with the subject line: subscribe paulloeb-articles.
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Without the promise of money to Republicans, and the threat of money against them to Democrats, politicians can once again revisit their consciences without the threat of their words costing them in the next election in the form of paid opposition.
If this happens, then true progressives understand that their voices can't be smothered in dollars.
But I've seen something else happening over the past 18 months or so. Progressives who fought 8 years of Bush policies seemed to take a collective vacation from the fray after Obama was elected. No matter how much Obama talked about "It's not about me; it's about us", many felt that the hard work had been done just by getting him elected. My hope is that those progressives are now waking up to smell the tea burning and recognizing that the work is not yet done.
Here's how miniprotesting would look to a tea bagger on a bus being taken to a Tea Party protest:
-a mile or two out from the event, he starts to notice small groups of four on successive street corners with one person in the middle holding a large sign at waist level while the others hold their signs overhead
-finally he starts reading the main signs, which in succession deliver a message the way the Burma Shave ads used to do in rural America in the '50s and '60s. The main signs give him this message:
"WE'RE NOT AFTER YOUR GUNS!"
"WE'RE AFTER YOUR LOGIC"
"DEMS SUPPORT YOUR FAMILY'S NEEDS
GOP SUPPORTS CORPORATE DONORS"
-He sees that sequence a couple of times, and he also sees:
"BIG OIL IS BANKROLLING YOUR MOVEMENT"
"KOCH INDUSTRIES PAID $5 MILLION TO GET YOU HERE"
"AND PAID TO DECIDE WHAT YOU SHOULD SAY"
-Some part of him starts to realize just how much he's been manipulated, and for whom.
-The next time they want him on the bus, he finds a reason to clean the barbecue or something.
We don't have to change their minds completely. We just have to give their activism a subtle bitter taste.
Miniprotests are arranged in protest strings of 12 people with three groups of four on three consecutive street corners. The main sign for each is a 30x40 with hand holes cut near the top.
Of course the Dems will try to scare you. Your answer to them," I SURVIVED 8 years of GW Bush and 1 Year of President Obama's sprint toward the ineffective Center. NOTHING scares me anymore except doing the same thing over and over again for a Party that seeks to use my money and energy and then deliver peanuts"
Take the extra time and energy and help build local infrastructure for progressive causes and link them to others who are doing the same thing.
I would suggest we start with blatant transparency to force accountabiity.. and I have an idea as to how to address this. I say that we require our representatives to suit up much like the nascar drivers, with prominent patches displaying their top 25 sponsors to go along with American flag pins.
Until that changes, there can be no REAL reform in the culture of violence, greed and no change in policy.
There is no hope working within the Dem or Repub party.
But I will share the sense of the weight lifted off my shoulders and how less angry I feel now that I've moved passed belief in the current two party system.
When more do the same, then some steps forward will be made. It may not be in my life time.
Intelligent people recognize that real change must occur incrementally and through compromise or the cure could prove more disastrous than the disease. Intelligent people will stay engaged with the process and work to remove obstructionists of either party from Congress. Intelligent people will recognize that a huge portion of the American population will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into a better world because change of any kind scares them. Don't let instant gratification denied make you a tool of the opposition.
Repubs were never going to vote along with Dems, no matter what Obama threw under the bus. They came right out and said that, and I have to hope that Obama and Rahm heard them, because I sure did.
So in my opinion this is just more of Bush stuff.
I do "hope" that the Dems don't use "hope and change" again as slogans. Obviously, that hopey changey thing was never going to happen. I assume the Dems will blame the victims, should they lose seats, but as far as I can see, if even Kucinich went belly-up, then there is no reason to think things will change if we keep voting in the same people. Einstein would call that insanity.
Martin Luther King
That's what I love about this guy! American history is littered with "Christian" religious leaders. Try as you might, you can't escape them. The thing that sets the right, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. apart from most of these guys is the fact that he wasn't a hypocrite. He never tried to twist the words of Jesus of Nazareth into anything other than what they were - a call to love one another and for kindness and gentleness. The Trappist monk Thomas Merton is another celebrated American Christian who took the gospel seriously. So was Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker. Give me a week and I might be able to name one or two others, but at the moment none come to mind. Both Merton and King died in 1968. Dorothy Day left this veil of tears in 1980. They're gone and they're not coming back.
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Tom Degan